IBM buys big-data analytics company Star Analytics

IBM is buying still more analytics expertise, picking up the software portfolio of Star Analytics, a company with expertise in automating the movement and management of workloads in hybrid computing environments.

The company’s Star Command Center is certified to run on Amazon Web Services, Oracle on Demand and Microsoft Azure infrastructure.

According to IBM’s statement announcing the deal on Friday, Star’s software helps “automatically integrate essential information, reporting applications and business intelligence tools across their enterprises, on premise or from cloud computing environments.”

As my colleague Derrick Harris wrote last month, the buzz around big data could be more about automation than discovering insights on the data.

Since 2005, IBM has spent $16 billion in 35 acquisitions of companies that deal in big data or analytics, a spokeswoman wrote in an email. Terms of this deal were not disclosed.

In 2011, IBM picked up the supply-chain and contract-management analytics company Emptoris. And last year it bought Varicent Software, which analyzes sales data, and Vivisimo, a provider of federated discovery and navigation software.

Currie Boyle, an IBM distinguished engineer who works on analytics of unstructured content, and other data luminaries will speak at GigaOM’s Structure:Data conference in New York in March.